Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

"
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string(208) "Mina Markham created the Pantsuit pattern library for the Hillary For America US presidential campaign in 2016. She spoke in detail about the experience - technical, professional and personal - at Respond 17."
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string(3843) "One of the very exciting aspects of this year's Summit conference is going back to the two day, two-tracks format that is so popular with many of our attendees.
What this does is allow multiple members of the same team working in different disciplines to attend the same event and see how all their efforts knit together. Summit really is a coming together of the web tech / digital tribes. Which is why our Video Ristretto today is particularly apt.
At Respond 17, Michael Taranto from SEEK gave a compelling talk that focused on how components might be a way of ensuring that designers and engineers use the same language, to make sure their efforts work together and not against one another.
It sounds a simple plan, and in some ways it really is. The great thing about Michael's talk is that it focuses on solutions, on how to do it, rather than just describing the problems and asking the questions. Definitely worth half an hour or so of your time. And then consider how much more like this you'll get at Summit this year.

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

"
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string(3549) "Following on from our Video Ristretto on Wednesday with Vitaly Friedman, and leading nicely into several sessions at Summit 17 next month (!) on voice, chat and conversation on the web, our Video of the Week also comes from Respond 17 back in May.
Dr Elizabeth Allen is a UX researcher and psychologist based in Toronto, Canada, who conducts research at the ecommerce platform Shopify to guide product teams in making strategic decisions about user experience.
Her talk Adventures in Conversational Commerce focused on designing and improving messaging bots that can autonomously handle customer service interactions, online marketing campaigns, and even make sales. It's a fascinating area with huge potential benefits for both service operators and product vendors, and the people who buy the products and services.
It's also fraught with potential pitfalls. Find 40 minutes to Elizabeth talk through some of what she's learned, so far.

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Ignore

"
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string(74) "Video of the Week: Adventures in Conversational Commerce - Elizabeth Allen"
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string(286) "Give yourself a 40 minute break to take in Elizabeth Allen at Respond 17, talking about the potential benefits and pitfalls of conversational commerce.
Without doubt, we will all soon be dealing with online bots. This is a great introduction to some of the key issues for designers."
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string(3851) "One thing you can be sure of with a Web Directions event - there will be surprises. That, of course, especially applies to our big Summit 17 conference in November - you're coming, I hope?
Back at Respond this year, for example, one of our international keynote speakers, Vitaly Friedman (founder, editor and boss at Smashing Magazine), put on an extra, unscheduled session.
The thing about Vitaly is that as well as running his Smashing empire of conferences, books and one of the most useful websites a web designer or developer could want to know, he's also still a working designer and developer himself.
His presentation, our Video Ristretto this week, focuses on his work with an ecommerce company, including improving their Checkout UX. Vitaly is such an engaging speaker with clever ideas and approaches, you really should find half an hour for this video.
And it's a great lead-in to some of the UX-focused sessions you'll see at Summit this year.

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our once-a-week mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions. And you'll get a complimentary digital copy of Scroll magazine.

Ignore

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string(9910) "A hectic week of Respond 17 - three days in Sydney, three days in Melbourne and one day in Brisbane - has wrapped up, and what an amazing event it was.
Our great thanks to all the speakers, including our international visitors who understandably find it onerous to travel all the way here, especially in an often already crowded speaking schedule.
I'm confident they are all glad they came, and they certainly all made a very strong impression on those who were there. So, many sincere thanks to Mina, Sarah, Vitaly, Elizabeth and Cordelia. You have all won many new fans here.
And I'd like to thank just as much our local speakers, a real mix of experienced presenters, those with a few talks under their belt and novices giving their first actual conference talks: Rebecca, Michael, Adem, Mike R, Mandy, Brett, Wayne, Mike S, Shafik, Laura and Warwick.
One of the hallmarks I look for in a successful Web Directions event is whether the speakers bond as a group - because if they do, the spirit of the conference soars to greater heights - and it's fair to say the Respond 17 speakers certainly did bond, with quite a few new personal and professional friendships formed.
And that's true among the attendees, too. Great to see so many people being so social with each other in real life, face to face.
Now, Ricky has already started work on the Wrap magazine for Respond 17, but if you need a quick summary right now, you won't find any better than Ben Buchanan's Big Stonking Post™.
Here's a few happy snaps from the Sydney event.
"
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string(5373) "Our next extract from the Respond 17Scroll magazine sheds some light not only on conference speaker Elizabeth Allen, but also the kind of experience user researchers occasionally run into.

Elizabeth Allen

Before Elizabeth Allen PhD moved into UX she was an experimental psychologist, whose research focused on explaining why humans can differ so widely in their cognitive and perceptual experiences of the world.
Which is to say that the move into User Experience really wasn’t much of a move at all.
Elizabeth took her research skills and applied them to working with a range of clients over the last four years or so, focusing on user research and design in relation to commercial customers and business outcomes.
For the past year, Elizabeth has been working with ecommerce provider Shopify, using her expertise to guide product and design strategy for the retail team.
It’s a world where designing effective customer experiences is critical and the competition is intense to hone the processes that will help a customer buy a product or service.
Which is why the focus of Elizabeth’s presentation at Respond 17 is Designing Conversational Commerce. Designing automated, autonomous, machine-based conversational interactions with prospective customers is one of the cutting edges in today’s (and tomorrow’s) ecommerce world.
Elizabeth speaks at conferences all over the world and, at a recent conference in New York she related an anecdote that well illustrated some of the trials the hands-on UX researcher can face.
As it happened, long time UX warrior Steve Portigal was at the same conference and documented it for his War Stories series, a long running feature on Steve’s website in which he records exactly these kinds of incidents and experiences, a series of stories so compelling that it has itself become the focus of a presentation Steve gives at conferences. Truly, pop will eat itself.
Steve has kindly given us permission to re-publish Elizabeth’s anecdote in full for Scroll. It is revealing not only for the unusual circumstances in which researchers can find themselves but even more for the application and commitment of the researcher to fulfil their task.
Elizabeth’s War Story: Ramping UpElizabeth Allen is a UX Researcher at Shopify, an ecommerce platform based in Canada. She told this story live at the Interaction 17 conference.
A few years ago, I was working at Centralis, a UX research and design consulting firm in the Chicago area. One of our clients was a public transportation agency, and our project involved testing the maps and signage within and between transit stations by accompanying participants as they completed realistic wayfinding scenarios to try to get from station to station and find their correct train or bus.
As part of this testing, my research partner Kathi Kaiser and I included individuals with motor and visual disabilities to make sure they were able to navigate just as well as those who didn’t have these challenges. One participant, Susan, was in a motorized wheelchair, and we began our session with a scenario that had us traveling to a station and accessing an elevated platform where she would wait for a train.
Chicago summers can be very hot and humid, and this was one of the hottest of the year. We were all sweating by the time we got to the station even though it was just a short walk from the coffee shop where we met to start the session. Now, this station had no elevator; instead, outside the station was a very long ramp to reach the platform. This was probably the longest ramp I’d ever seen at a transit station — it had two or three switchbacks just to reach the top!
We started up the ramp, and when we were about halfway up, Susan’s wheelchair started slowing down. “Uh oh”, she said. “I think my battery is about to die. I totally forgot to charge it before I went out, and steep ramps like this always make it run out faster.” Sure enough, a few seconds later, the wheelchair slowed to a halt, completely dead.
That's the end of this excerpt from Scroll magazine. Elizabeth is now in Melbourne with the rest of the amazing line-up at Respond 17."
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string(3346) "Just days away from the start of the 3-city week-long festival of design that is Respond 17 (you're booked in for Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, right?) seems an opportune moment to review the presentation delivered at Respond just a year ago by Ethan Marcotte.
While this engaging and inspiring talk focuses - naturally - on responsive web design, the principle of what Ethan calls "laziness" can be applied to a whole range of activities. It's all about achieving more by doing less, what is sometimes referred to as "boxing clever".
And with that, I'll hand you over to the father of RWD for an hour or so.

Got your ticket for 2017 yet?

For Respond 17, we've put together a truly remarkable two-day program of international and local speakers digging into front end design and development, that we're taking in full to Sydney (4-5 May) and Melbourne (8-9 May), with a special trip to Brisbane as well (11 May). Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our once-a-week mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions. And you'll get a complimentary digital copy of Scroll magazine.

Ignore

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string(5065) "As is often the case, our next major event - Respond 17 - is not only a two-day conference, but also has a third day devoted to a Masterclass workshop with Vitaly Friedman (in Brisbane, we'll present only the workshop).
Our roster of past Masterclass workshop leaders reads like an album of who's who in web design over the last decade, and Vitaly represents another great page in that album. Given that his session is on packing all these great responsive design tools and techniques into a cohesive and comprehensive toolkit, you should give serious thought to coming along.
For perspective, here's our Wrap account of the Respond 16 Masterclass led by Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane. This was written by Simon Vrachliotis, a first time web conference attendee who decided to join the Masterclass at the last minute.

Responsive Design: Content, Code, Collaboration

presented by Ethan Marcotte and Karen McGrane

Described by Simon Vrachliotis

I'm at Darling Harbour, on a glorious autumn Sydney Wednesday morning, and the anticipation is high.
I'm about to step into a responsive web design workshop hosted by none other than Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte. Respond 16 is my first major conference, and the idea of even being in a room with these people feels almost surreal.
My co-worker Matt is also attending. We got our tickets at the last minute, and the prospect of spending an entire day sponging knowledge from two iconic industry leaders has us pretty excited.
Ethan Marcotte kicks thing off with the first presentation. This guy doesn't just give a talk, he gives a performance.
Each word, spoken with a slow-paced, calm voice, seems carefully designed. The long pauses allow my mind to process it all, the spikes of humour perfectly break up the intensity.
The room is lapping it up and soaking it in. Ethan is a master at the art of public speaking, and has clearly put a lot of effort into putting together top quality content.

"The only thing we can reliably know is the size of the browser window."

Karen McGrane is up next. Her style is very different. Ethan's philosophical, almost poetic performance gives way to some sharp, provocative, cold hard facts about the wide gap that sits between responsive web design and the corporate/enterprise world.
Slide after slide, Karen brings us infographics that carry undeniable business value, the sort of stuff you can print and show a CEO to give you instant leverage when suggesting a responsive web design strategy.
Karen does a great job at calling out situations with which most of us have been familiar throughout our careers. She gives us ammunition for the next time such situations occur.

"Mobile first is about designing for focus."

We then undertook a group exercise where content hierarchy had to be structured on a stream of post-it notes stacking on top of each other. This had the participants talking to each other, and some interesting discussions were sparked among the teams.
It felt like the workshop had kicked in and there would be more of this. However, after the groups regained their sitting spots, the day went back to listening to Karen and Ethan and there were no more workshop activities.
Between them, the two presenters made convincing cases for using fluid layout and adaptive design, demonstrated relevant techniques, showed how to build a business case for responsive design - and did this with clarity, insight and humour.
If I could have improved anything, it would have been having more hands-on exercises and do-it-yourself activities throughout the day. We were told we could bring our laptops, but never really needed to use them.
The quality of the information delivered was extremely high. We all came away with a much better understanding of designing to suit content delivered on an unpredictable range of devices.
Karen and Ethan clearly have extensive experience and skill in both responsive web design and public speaking. Attending their workshop was a privilege.

Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly Friedman is a very high profile writer, speaker and workshop leader on a range of topics associated with emerging web technology.
As co-founder and Editor-in-Chief, Vitaly is very strongly identified with Smashing Magazine, one of the best known online magazines focusing on web design and development.
In 10 years, Smashing has grown from a small blog to one of the world’s major publishers of articles by industry experts on a just about any topic associated with web technology. Smashing has evolved in that time to also become a publisher and vendor of books (print and digital), a presenter of conferences and workshops (face-to-face and online) and maintains a list of design / programming job vacancies around the world.
There’s no question that Smashing Magazine is now one of the leading avenues of professional development for people in the web industry anywhere in the world.
So how did it all come about?
In February this year while in Croatia, Vitaly gave a rare and lengthy video interview to local tech events organiser DaFED, in which he opened up about this.

“For me it all started 18 years ago - it makes me feel so old saying that - in 1998 or 99 when I was just trying to figure out what to do with my life. Somebody showed me the internet and that was a big new thing for me. It was really powerful for me to have that feeling that I'm able to publish content for free and make it available to everybody.
I was born [in 1985] in Belarus - I grew up in Minsk - and I bought a CD which had Photoshop and Illustrator and other programs for one dollar! Everybody was talking about Photoshop but I started using Image Styler, an application that probably nobody knows because there was only ever one release, and I started using it to create images and then websites.
I stuck with that until 2006 - nobody around there was using it but I mastered it, and because it was a really constrained environment it helped me master this medium and understand how to build and create websites. So, that was my start way back in 1998.”

It wasn’t long before young Vitaly fell into publishing.

“I had a football blog which was all about getting scores from different ... not many people know this, but I published 28 or 29 issues, which were designed in Word Art (if that tells anybody anything). It was horribly designed and I had maybe 300-400 people subscribing to it by email, and then eventually I also got a website for it.
From that point on I went from focusing on content into web design, then towards freelancing later. I don't know whether that site is still live, I don't think so because it was on free hosting - with lots of ads. It was virtualace.net if anybody wants to look it up.”

In 2000, Vitaly’s family moved to Germany and naturally he came with them.

“This was a really tough time for me because I didn't understand the language. I didn't speak German and I had no money, no friends, no social circle. I literally had to fight - like most kids brought in to a new, different environment. I felt that it was important for me to be independent so I wanted to find a way to earn my own money and not depend on my parents or my brother.
I tried very hard to learn the language fast, and after a year I found myself understanding German – not being able to speak it properly, but understanding it – and I was trying to find a way to earn money and so I kind of referred back to the thing I could do and that was building websites.
I wasn't a master, I was an amateur at best, but many people were experimenting and playing so I just started trying to do something in this area.
I became a freelancer for web design and development.”

That's the end of this excerpt from Scroll magazine. Come and see Vitaly and the rest of the amazing line-up at Respond 17 in May.
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string(5357) "Our Scroll magazine Scroll magazine contains considerably more than just profiles of the Respond 17 speakers. We look for different ways to add perspective, context and - ultimately - value to your conference experience.
Sketchnotes are a terrific way of summarising conference presentations, using evocative illustrations to emphasise key points and capture some of the flavour of a talk. For Respond 17, we asked one of the best sketchnoters we know to come along and record his impressions. We feel very lucky that Matt Magain said yes.
The result of that will be in our post-conference Wrap magazine, but we wanted to introduce you to Matt and his work, so we obtained permission to reproduce a summarised version of an article he wrote for UX Mastery in which he delivered 20 tips for budding sketchnoters.
We've extracted a few of Matt's tips here for your reading pleasure. You'll find the rest in Scroll.

Matthew Magain

Sketchnoting 101: How to Create Awesome Visual Notes

Matt Magain will be at Respond 17 in Sydney to sketchnote the conference. In this abridged version of his UX Mastery article, he lists 20 tips for honing your sketchnoting skills.

1. Tool up

While it’s not essential to use an expensive art pen and a trendy moleskine notebook to create beautiful sketchnotes, you don’t want to start off on the back foot. Spend a few bucks on the minimum amount of stationery that gives you the best chance at creating something you’re proud of, but doesn’t weigh you down.

3. Master sketching common objects

It’s useful to have a cache of objects in your repertoire, ready to pull out as needed. In particular, if you attend tech conferences, there are certain words that will crop up time and again (think “ship”, “cloud”, “user”, “link”). Practice visual representations of these words in advance, so you don’t get flustered trying to draw them for the first time in the middle of a talk.

7. Latch onto quotes

Quotes—whether they be key phrases you hear the presenter say, or quotes by other people that the presenter uses in his talk—are often poignant summaries of a topic, and you should listen carefully for them. When you hear one that resonates or beautifully summarises the point being made, jot it down and wrap it in some fancy talking marks or a speech balloon.

10. Curate

It can be tempting to try and capture everything about the presentation. Instead, think of yourself as an art curator whose job it is to sort through the noise, and select a few standout masterpieces to include in your exhibition. Your sketchnote should not serve as a comprehensive reference—it’s a moment in time that reflects the takeaways that you found important.

15. Draw beautiful ampersands

The ampersand is a much-loved character by graphic designers. Depending on the typeface, it can be a simple, understated connector or an elaborate, eccentric statement all of its own. Being able to whip one of these out instead of your usual handwriting can really make a heading stand out.

Got your ticket for 2017 yet?

For Respond 17, we've put together a truly remarkable two-day program of international and local speakers digging into front end design and development, that we're taking in full to Sydney (4-5 May) and Melbourne (8-9 May), with a special trip to Brisbane as well (11 May). Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our once-a-week mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions. And you'll get a complimentary digital copy of Scroll magazine.

Mina Markham

Coding a Pantsuit

Interview for Communication Arts, 2016.
How did you first get started in front-end development and interactive design?
My interest can be traced back to my high school journalism class. I was on the newspaper staff, and part of my role, in addition to writing, was to design the layout for articles. I realized that I enjoyed laying out articles more than writing them.
I loved discovering new ways to visually represent the stories I had written. That was pretty telling for me. Once I got into print design, it was a natural evolution to interactive design, and from there, into front-end development.
How did you learn the necessary skills?
I have a formal design education from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. My time there helped me develop an aesthetic and understanding of what makes good design. I worked in print design and advertising for about five years before I made the switch. During that time, I was also working on interactive projects for freelance clients, teaching myself what I needed to know for each project.
I did this by reading blogs, tutorials and books, attending conferences, and studying other people’s work. Viewing the source code of my favorite websites was, and still is, a big part of my learning process. It was a lot of trial and error—but mostly errors.
I used the online technology schools Treehouse and Code School to do interactive code challenges. The CSS resource website CSS-Tricks is a godsend. CodePen is great for seeing examples of various front-end techniques. Chris Coyier is my unofficial professor of the Internet.
I also love reading the blogs of front-end web developers Sara Soueidan and Una Kravets. The book collection A Book Apart is great for deep dives on single topics. And some favorite conferences are the Front Porch Conference, the Front-End Design Conference and the CSS Dev Conf.
What led you to join Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as a senior software engineer?
A friend of mine worked for Obama in 2012, and when the time came to build a technology team for Secretary Clinton’s campaign, my friend suggested me. I hadn’t worked in politics before, so this was not something that would have occurred to me.
Once I realized the potential impact I could have, it was too good to pass up. Not many people get handed an opportunity to be a part of history.
What were the greatest challenges of creating Pantsuit, Hillary for America’s internal design system?
Ideally, when creating a design system, you build it in tandem with the product it powers so they can both grow and adapt as needed. Initially, the biggest challenge was that I was locked into an existing design. The first version of Pantsuit was written as a one-to-one interface parity with the donation platform at the time.
So I had to figure out a way to rewrite all the underlying code powering the design, without making any visual changes. This type of code refactor isn’t unusual, but doing so at the scale and speed required—and creating a design system in the process—was a unique challenge.
One of the requirements of a system like Pantsuit is modularity. To achieve this, I had to take the existing patterns I saw and anticipate how they might be used in a different context. Each design was broken down into smaller pieces that could be rearranged into a new pattern. As I was building the pieces of Pantsuit, I was using those pieces to create a new, yet identical, version of the donations platform. Sometimes, I would find that I was too broad in my definition of a pattern or module and would have to rethink my approach.
For both versions of Pantsuit, I created an interface inventory of each design. I printed copies of each user flow and cut out pieces of the design. I tried to get as granular with the interface as possible: buttons, form inputs, typographic treatments, navigational elements, etc.
Afterwards, I grouped similar pieces together to see if they could be consolidated. For example, narrowing down buttons to two sizes or simplifying the color palette. This process made the code more consistent and easier to mix and match into new patterns.
That's the end of this excerpt from Scroll magazine. Come and see Mina and the rest of the amazing line-up at Respond 17 in May.
Interview originally published at http://www.commarts.com/column/coding-pantsuit"
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string(2310) "Several recent Videos of the Week focused on new capabilities in style and layout control, and how they open up opportunities for designers to extend their creative vision on the web.
Examples include talks by Stephanie Rewis, Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons.
Well, this week is no different.
At Direction 16, Andy Clarke's inspiring keynote Art Directing Web Design not only gave us another stepping stone toward understanding what can be achieved with new techniques, including some mesmerising layout techniques, but also laid a great foundation for our upcoming Respond conference, where this is all taken to yet another level.
So enjoy 47 video minutes or so with one of our favourite presenters - I think we worked out that he holds the record for talks and workshops at Web Directions events worldwide - and get warmed up for Respond 17.
Like to watch and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our once a week mailing list where we round up the week's best reading and watching on all things Web. And you'll get a complimentary digital copy of Scroll magazine.
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string(4219) "Respond started life as a "pop-up" single-day conference in Sydney, addressing the specific challenges associated with web design in the age of multi screens.
Initially, the focus was very practical and revolved a lot around CSS – and specific responsive patterns – to do with images, navigation on small screens, accessibility on mobile devices, and so on.
But front end design has come a long way in the relatively short time since we held that first event, and so Respond has evolved to more broadly address the challenges of designing great experiences.
But a central part of this continues to be the technologies we work with to build these experiences – CSS, HTML, SVG, and more.
At Respond this year, there'll be more than a little focus on these, though if that's not what you work with every day, there will still be considerable value in gaining a sense of what's possible today in our browsers that you can incorporate into your designs or product roadmaps.
First up, Vitaly Friedman, one of the foremost experts in responsive design and development, will survey the current browser technology landscape, HTTP/2, Service Workers, Responsive Images, Flexbox, SVG and Font Loading APIs, and consider how we can use them to create great experiences. For the more technically inclined, this is a great how-to, while for those who don't live in the code, it's an eye-opener as to what's possible. It's leading edge today, but these will be baseline requirements not too far from now.
Rachel Nabors, who knows more about animation on the web than just about anyone, will look at the tools available to create engaging dynamic animated experiences. Again, motion design is already a key principle to master for the emerging web.
Mike Riethmuller will look at how type responds to the user's screen size, orientation and resolution – a holy grail of responsive design – and the CSS we need to make it a reality.
In a related session, Mandy Michael will look at various features of CSS to help create eye-catching text effects.
Brett Snaidero will complement Rachel's presentation by giving us a look at how SVG combined with CSS enables animation with little pain, and no need for complex code.
If your primary job is building the front end, and working with CSS, HTML and SVG, there's more than enough here to considerably extend your skill set and inspire you, while if you're focused more on UX, CX, IxD, and Product Design, come and see what tools are now available to create even more compelling experiences.
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string(4713) "We in web tech do not work in a vacuum. While it might be tempting - whether you're a designer, a front end developer, an engineer, an information architect or anything else - to think just in terms of technical expertise, specifications, skills and code, the real world does not consist of ones and zeroes.
The technical products and services we devise not only change what we as human beings can do, but also how we relate to each other. We're seeing the truth of that every day, and more so, and that awareness underpins several of the keynote presentations at our Summit conference next month.
Our Video of the Week is of one of our international keynote speakers at our Respond 17 design conference. Mina Markham is the US senior UI engineer who created and maintained the Pantsuit UI pattern library for the Hillary For America US presidential campaign in 2016.
That alone is a great story, how Mina put together a suite of design elements for a campaign at such a huge level and with such massive implications. It's an incredibly complex project that Mina handled with aplomb and great desxterity. But there's another aspect to Mina's story and it does come out in this video.
The campaign took place amid one of the most hotly contested (to put it mildy) elections in history, with an explosive result, the consequences of which continue to resound around the world. In that milieu, the experience of the African American woman who put together a design campaign to try to help get the first woman President of the USA elected was never going to be a comfortable one.
And it's not. Some of what Mina relates in this video is very unsettling and upsetting. That doesn't mean you shouldn't see it. Mina always relates to her work, and there are great lessons in here on how to do that with dignity and self-confidence in the face of some confronting treatment.
It is, in fact, an entirely inspiring 43 minutes.

Got your ticket for Summit 17 yet?

Last year's Direction has morphed into this year's Summit - two days and two tracks of presentations crammed with ideas, challenges, techniques and breakthroughs in design, development and the overarching themes and concerns driving the breakneck evolution of our web and digital industry. It all takes place in Sydney on 9-10 November. Come and join us!

Want more?

Like to see and read more like this? Be the first to score invitations to our events? Then jump on our weekly newsletter mailing list to keep up with everything happening at Web Directions, as well as regular bursts of links to relevant articles & resources curated by John Allsopp - and we can promise you some exclusive and substantial subscriber benefits.

Presentations about respond

Podcasts, slides, videos and more

Comments Off on Video of the Week: Styling Hillary: A Design System for All Americans – Mina Markham

Mina Markham created the Pantsuit pattern library for the Hillary For America US presidential campaign in 2016. She spoke in detail about the experience – technical, professional and personal – at Respond 17.

Comments Off on Video of the Week: CSS + SVG: A Designer’s Delight – Sara Soueidan

We’re going back to Respond 16 for our Video of the Week this week, when Sara Soueidan came to visit and delivered an inspiring, eye-opening keynote presentation on what can be done with CSS and SVG working together.

Our next extract from the Respond 17 Scroll magazine sheds some light not only on conference speaker Elizabeth Allen, but also the kind of experience user researchers occasionally run into.
Elizabeth Allen

Comments Off on Video of the Week: Laziness in the Time of Responsive Design – Ethan Marcotte

Just days away from the start of the 3-city week-long festival of design that is Respond 17 (you’re booked in for Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, right?) seems an opportune moment to review the presentation delivered at Respond just … Read more »

As is often the case, our next major event – Respond 17 – is not only a two-day conference, but also has a third day devoted to a Masterclass workshop with Vitaly Friedman (in Brisbane, we’ll present only the workshop).

Our roster of past Masterclass workshop leaders reads like an album … Read more »

Our Scroll magazine Scroll magazine contains considerably more than just profiles of the Respond 17 speakers. We look for different ways to add perspective, context and – ultimately – value to your conference experience.

Sketchnotes are a terrific way of summarising conference presentations, using evocative illustrations to emphasise … Read more »

About

The people and thoughts behind Web Directions

Founded in Australia in 2004, by long time web industry figures John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin, (and now run by John), Web Directions conferences bring together the web industry’s leading experts from around the world to educate and inspire our attendees.